


Observations of Competitive Reproduction

by MegaBadBunny



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Episode: s04e13 Journey's End, F/M, Ficandchips, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluffy Ending, Identity Issues, Kissing, Missing Scene, Pete's World, Post-Episode: s04e13 Journey's End, Romantic Fluff, there's a sad moment or two but there's lots of fluff to pad it out, warnings for brief mention of loss of child, warnings for mention of loss of family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 17:02:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7231066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MegaBadBunny/pseuds/MegaBadBunny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the tumblr nonny who sent an Ask to my Rose and Tentoo blog asking if I thought Tentoo was "a cheap clone." <3</p><p>(“I’m still the same, you know,” he says later, on the zeppelin ride home. They’re alone in this part of the cabin and she’s been staring out the window for hours. “Still me,” he adds.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Observations of Competitive Reproduction

One of the many marvelous things about a Time Lord brain is that it’s capable of processing at least a thousand thoughts in any given moment. Equations and potentialities and exabytes of knowledge and millions of memories preserved in pristine eidetic detail all weave themselves together in a complicated sequence that would fry even the most powerful supercomputers, a glorious symphony that would make Mozart weep with envy. This is how the great world of Gallifrey dominated the universe for ten million years, presiding over Sontarans and Ice Warriors and Autons, traveling between dimensions and parallel realities, taming the ravages of time and space. This is how the Doctor has survived as long as he has.

But Donna says, “Why don’t you ask her yourself?” and each and every one of those thousand thoughts competing for attention in the Doctor’s very impressive brain grinds to a loud and messy stop.

Donna looks over his shoulder.

He turns around to see what it is.

There, at the end of the street, standing in the lamplit dark amidst wreckage and debris—there she is. Blonde hair and a leather jacket and a gun half as tall as she is, and suddenly there’s room in his head for only one thing.

 _Rose_.

He stares. He blinks. He breathes.

She smiles.

He runs.

If a single other thought does manage to amble through his mind, it’s something along the lines of how wonderful it feels to run _to_ something instead of _from_ it, just this once.

Unfortunately, as marvelous as a Time Lord brain is, it is, at the end of the day, still a brain. That means it’s still prone to all the same flaws and foibles as any other brain in any other sentient creature; it falls victim to all the same oversights, overloads, and fuckups. Even if it happens far less frequently for Time Lords than it does for other advanced creatures, every once in a while, a small thing is bound to slip through the noise unnoticed. Like, oh, say, the date of a companion’s birthday, or whether the Andallan Worker Revolution starts in 45k.2 or 45k.2.2, or the fact that books are made of trees, or whether there’s a Dalek waiting in the shadows to shoot you when you’re just a little busy running towards the love of your lives.

At least, that’s what he thinks when he wakes up later, half-human and part Donna and all-naked and his veins hotly pumping with adrenaline and fear and elation all at once.

(Well, that, and he wonders why the TARDIS is on fire.)

 

**

 

A lot happens over the next hour (rather, the next fifty-eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds, by his reckoning), and when he’s not running headlong into danger (per usual) or committing genocide against the Daleks (again) or flitting about the TARDIS console and sneaking glances at Rose when she isn’t looking (always), he quickly takes inventory of all the differences between the Doctor, Mark 10, and the Doctor, Mark…something else.

“Sort of a half-arsed regeneration, isn’t it?” Mickey teases, looking him over.

“Oi,” the Doctor protests. He straightens his jacket and pretends to be offended. “I’ll have you know, my regenerations are always the full arse.”

“So what are you?” asks Jackie.

“Capricorn, on the cusp of Aquarius,” the Doctor says easily, winking at Rose from across the control desk. She laughs (at him or the reference, he doesn’t know and he doesn’t care) and he can’t help but grin.

“But what are you really?” Jackie presses.

Rose and Martha exchange worried looks and Rose nudges her mum with her elbow. “Don’t be rude, Mum.”

“Come on, it’s a fair question! It’s not like anybody here knows what a meta-whatsit is, anyway.”

Nobody jumps in to agree with her, but nobody has to; the air is thick with quiet and the Doctor can feel all eyes in the room—everyone from Rose to Martha to Donna and Mickey and Sarah Jane and Jackie and Jack—all of them, trained on him.

For the first time since he regenerated (well, half-generated, Mickey’s not entirely wrong about that), he falters a little bit. Because he knows exactly what he is, and who, and for that matter how and when and why. He feels just as much like himself as he did a few hours ago, tracking stolen planets and beaming at old companions and outwitting presumptuous Judoon. Well, he feels like himself with one heart and a rubbish lifespan and vastly overrated human sensory perception, but if Rose and Martha can put up with all of that, why can’t he?

The TARDIS has accepted him without so much as a hiccup, but if the last near-millennia of traveling with humans has taught him anything, it’s that humankind invariably considers anything new or different to frightening and dangerous and _wrong._

“It is a fair question,” Donna says, her voice ringing through the room. “Etymologically speaking, you’ve got ‘meta’ from the Greek, meaning ‘after’ or ‘beyond,’ and ‘crisis’ meaning ‘decision,’ but I think Old High Gallifreyan offers a much more nuanced method of describing—”

“There was one of me, and now there’s two,” the other Doctor interrupts.

“Three,” says Donna.

“Three,” the other Doctor concedes, with just the barest ghost of a grin.

Martha just rolls her eyes. “Don’t think the universe can properly hold one of you, don’t know what it’s supposed to do with three,” she jokes.

Everybody laughs at that. Everybody except the other Doctor, that is. He crosses his arms and leans back against a coral strut, looking on while everyone else chats excitedly. To an outside observer, he could simply be watching the bustle all around him, but the Doctor knows better; he’s also listening to the hum of the TARDIS to make sure she’s running smoothly after such an arduous task, planning a trip down to the fuel cells to look them over, calculating the amount of energy output needed to close a series of intradimensional rifts, determining how much time they have left before the spatial engines cool down enough to move again, figuring it down to the microsecond, and sorting through timelines and causalities and silently cursing himself because every single formula, each and every function, is bringing him to the same conclusion, and he can’t think of a single variable that he could change to generate a better sum.

Three Doctors and numerous companions and no matter how he frames it, this equation will never amount to anything more than _one_.

 

**

 

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” the Doctor says, following his other self down the corridor, toward the spatial engines. “There’s got to be another way. There usually is.”

“‘Usually’ being the operative word,” the Doctor calls over his shoulder as he walks. “And thanks for your concern, but I’ve already had this argument with myself once, don’t much fancy doing it again.”

“You don’t have to be alone,” the Doctor calls after him.

He watches his other self as he halts in his tracks, the rigid lines of his shoulders and his back freezing to stone. The other Doctor clenches his hands into fists, fingernails biting into the soft flesh of his palms. Slowly, his other self forces himself to relax, or to put on the appearance of it, anyway.

“Are you really going to pretend that you’re not wildly ecstatic about everything that’s going to happen? About how things will end up for you?” the other Doctor asks. He turns around with a grim smile stretched across his face. “Be honest. Otherwise, you’re only lying to yourself.”

“Honestly, then? Everyone loses something here. I’m not exactly looking forward to going without the TARDIS or my old physiology or my remaining regenerations,” the Doctor replies.

Emotion wells up inside him then, some strange bittersweet mixture of grief and—well, if he was hard-pressed to label the others, he might call them happiness, maybe hope. There’s a funny clenching feeling in his throat and he has to work to breathe past it.

“But,” he says. He takes a deep breath, steadying himself. “She’s worth it.”

The other Doctor huffs dismissively. “Of course she is. Goes without saying.”

“Though I imagine saying it helps.”

Eyebrow arched, the other Doctor shoots him a sharp look. “How very human of you,” he murmurs. He walks back, his steps slow, his eyes trained on a face that looks exactly like his. The Doctor watches his other self approach, finds it’s far easier to hold his own gaze that anyone else’s.

“Do you still feel it?” the other Doctor whispers. “Do you still hear…?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing like before.”

“Right,” his other self says, and just like that, it’s like the mask has slid back on. Curtains and walls draw themselves snugly back around him, stiffening his posture and dampening the presence of his mind; nothing else is getting in or out today. Wordlessly, he turns on his heel to walk away again. To pretend to check on things, to hide until the inevitable.

“She won’t understand,” the Doctor tells him.

The other Doctor doesn’t turn around this time when he replies, his voice hard.

“She doesn’t have to.”

 

**

 

Rose doesn’t, of course. Understand.

She takes one look at him on the beach, after the TARDIS has left without so much as an imprint on the sand, the Doctor without even a goodbye; she drops his hand and turns away without a single word.

Waves crash and wind whistles and the silence has never been so heavy.

 

**

 

“I’m still the same, you know,” he says later, on the zeppelin ride home. They’re alone in this part of the cabin and she’s been staring out the window for hours. “Still me,” he adds.

Rose fixes him with a stony stare. “Prove it.”

Not a totally unreasonable request. (He tells himself that because it’s better than feeling that twisting sensation inside his chest, suspiciously close to where a second heart should be. And how do you prove that you are who are you are, anyway?)

“What would convince you?” he asks.

“Tell me your name.”

“Fluffy McPorpington III,” he replies. “Esquire. Next question?”

Rose does not smile. “Why did he send me away?”

“You’ll have to be a bit more specific than that, I’m afraid; I’ve sent you away plenty of times.”

“Did you know what he was going to do today?”

“I did.”

“Why didn’t you stop him?”

“Well,” the Doctor says, scratching the back of his neck. “As I might have mentioned previously, I’m the same person. Stands to reason I’d be of the same mind. Literally the same mind. I have all the same thoughts and ideas and feelings as I did before. Same as my other self. It’s kind of funny that way.”

“So you both though this was the right thing to do,” Rose says, her voice sharp like a flint.

“I don’t suppose I get any brownie points for admitting that I have feelings?”

Rose tears her gaze away from him, stares back out the window instead. Fidgeting uncomfortably next to her, the Doctor waits a few minutes, hoping she’ll break the silence.

She doesn’t.

He sighs. “I should have given you a choice,” he says. “It was wrong, and I should have known better. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, an apology!” Rose laughs bitterly. “Well, then. It really must be you, right? Cos no one else apologizes more. Pro tip, though: an apology doesn’t actually mean anything if you keep doing the same things over and over.”

“Do I often split into two people in front of you?” he asks, mild.

“You pushed me away,” Rose says. “You sent me home from the Games Station. You used other people to put distance between us. Hell, you deserted me thousands of years in the future so you could play the bloody hero in pre-plumbing France. This isn’t even the first time you sent me to this universe—tell me, did you do it on purpose, or was it just a happy accident that all these loose ends tied up for you? I guess that means no stupid clingy girlfriend cramping your style, not when the real you can pawn her off on some cheap clone!”

She bites her lip the instant the words leave her mouth, like she already regrets them, might be able to stop them somehow, but it’s too late; weapons were hurled and damage done. The Doctor just stares at her, speechless, while he tries to sort out which of her words hurts the most.

(He’s tempted to get up and leave. Approximately 98.4% of his instincts are screaming to get up, to walk away, to hide and lick his wounds, or more accurately, distract himself somehow until the problem goes away. But then there’s that little nagging human bit, that meager 1.6%, that urges him to stay. To talk.

Bloody Donna.)

“Well, which is it?” he asks, just a hint of impatience creeping through. “Which one do you want to know about? It’s quite a long list. Or should I just go through them all?”

Sighing, Rose shakes her head. “Don’t—”

“Firstly, I don’t choose stupid. I certainly don’t hold well with clingy. I absolutely don’t ask stupid, clingy people to travel with me, not once, not twice, but three times. So that’s enough of that,” the Doctor half-snaps. “As for the other, I sent you home from the Games Station for what should be an obvious reason, one you already know, so I won’t waste your time on that. Running into Sarah Jane was a happy coincidence and an unhappy reminder,” he counts off, “and that’s why I invited Mickey Smith onboard. And I don’t regret it, because that means he was stuck in the other universe with you, when you needed him the most. I left you thousands of years in the future because I’m a coward, every time. Though I do feel compelled to point out that Emergency Programme One would have taken you home if I hadn’t returned when I did. It isn’t as if you would have been stranded there for an eternity.”

“That isn’t the point and you—”

“And I sent you  here,” he says, a little louder, and he doesn’t like that he’s overpowering her voice with his but he’s got to get this all out now, right now, before he loses his nerve, “for your sake, as well as mine.”

Rose raises an eyebrow, confusion temporarily displacing her anger. “What are you talking about?”

“I shouldn’t have to watch you die,” he tells her. “And you shouldn’t have to give up everything to be with me.”

“I made my choice,” Rose argues softly.

“Yes, and that—that meant a lot to me,” he confesses, quieting. He swallows the lump that’s suddenly sprung up in his throat. “It still does. But see, I made my choice too. Because there are some things that you can’t know unless you’ve lived them. I’ve lived all of those things enough for the both of us. And until you’ve lost your family—and I mean really, properly lost, not for a year, not just while you’re traveling in the TARDIS—you don’t know what it’s like for them to be truly gone.”

He chuckles darkly. “Do you know what I—what some people would give, just for one more day with their family?”

Before Rose has a chance to respond, except for the way her lips part and something somewhere between a question and an apology hovers on them, the Doctor pushes ahead.

“I’ve already stolen one year from your mother. It was an honest mistake, could happen to anyone, but still, it happened. Can you imagine how she would mourn if you were lost to her forever? You’ve lost people, I know, but you’ve never known the loss of your own child.”

She’s much too quiet, watching him with an unreadable expression on her face. He keeps going.

“The truth is, if I didn’t exist—this me, I mean, sitting here with you right now—then things would probably be a little different. It was very difficult losing you the first time around. It was, at times, unbearable,” he confesses, unable to look her in the eye as he does so.

“It would have been all too easy to let you give yourself to me, the original me, in the other universe; I would have written everything else off as a side effect. The good things would have been good enough to justify the bad, or so I would have reasoned. Your mother is devastated when you never come home? Sad, but at least she’s got another child to keep her company. Your brother grows up without a sister, you never see the person he becomes? Oh well, you only had a handful of years together anyway, not like he’ll really remember what he’s missing out on. You miss your family terribly? No worries, we can commiserate, I miss my entire planet.

“Your body is degrading? Unfortunate, but unavoidable,” he says before she can interrupt, his voice picking up in speed and urgency. “We’ll stave it off as best we can for as long as we can, maybe get a good eighty years out of the whole thing if we’re lucky. Maybe a hundred and twenty, if you don’t mind some suspiciously Cybus-like upgrades. You’re too old, too tired, to travel anymore? Not a problem, I’ll travel without you, come home with all my stories, and we’ll both just ignore your growing resentment at my youth and longevity, because there’s certainly no way the other me will ever stop running long enough to take the slow path with you. You start to forget everything, the entire life we built together? That’s all right, I’ll remember it for you. You die, centuries before me, leaving me all alone? Again? Only to be expected—over the course of a millennia, everyone’s bound to accumulate a couple of dead wives!”

Stopping to catch his breath, his chest heaving a little, he notices that moisture has gathered around Rose’s eyes, glittering in the cabin’s low light. His eyes feel suspiciously wet, too. He blinks a few times until the blurriness clears and the pressure behind his cheekbones abates, silently cursing his ridiculous new body and its stupid unpredictable hormones.

“Wow,” Rose says, her voice shaky. She thumbs a tear away from her face, smudging her makeup just a bit. “Are you sure you’re really you? Cos normally you’d rather throw yourself in a black hole than open up like this.”

“If I could find a happier ending for you, even if it meant a part of me had to give you up, shouldn’t I do that?” he asks. (Pleads.) “Isn’t that what love is?”

The fight drains out of Rose; he can hear it in the way the air pushes out of her lungs, how her shoulders fall. The tension in her face goes soft.

“Why didn’t you just talk to me about all this?” she asks.

“Because if you still asked me to stay, even despite all that, even knowing what would happen…I would be too selfish to say no,” he admits.

She doesn’t say anything to that. They both fall quiet, the silence only filled with the gentle hum of zeppelin-engines buzzing somewhere beneath their feet. The Doctor tries to ignore how the hum is just a pitch off from the sound of the TARDIS, wonders if Rose has noticed that, too.

“Well,” Rose says after a moment, brushing any lingering tears away. “You can’t keep doing that. From now on, you’ve got to be honest with me upfront, if we’re gonna make this work. Okay?”

Now the Doctor is the one who’s confused. “Sorry?”

“Next time, don’t wait forever to tell me everything.”

He perks up. “Next time?” he asks hopefully.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m still angry about this time,” Rose grumbles. “How would you like it if you did so many years of work, only to be dropped right back off at square one without so much as a by-your-leave?”

“Ah,” the Doctor says, cringing a bit.

“You can’t keep making my decisions for me. No matter how noble your intentions are, you’ve got to let me choose for myself. It’s entirely reasonable for me to be upset with you about that.”

“True,” he agrees, “but really, if you think about it, aren’t you actually angry at the other me? Not me-me? I’m the one who decided to stay, after all.”

“Yeah, but if you’re both the same person, then that means you’re also the one who decided to leave me here,” Rose points out.

The Doctor opens his mouth to argue, but nothing comes to his aid. Traitorous words. He’ll have to have, well, a word with them later.

“Don’t suppose I could be ever-so-slightly a different person?” he asks, and Rose’s lips twitch in response. He’s tempted to ask if that’s a smile, but he thinks maybe he shouldn’t push his luck, just this once.

Tentatively, he nudges her hand, the one on the armrest next to him, and doesn’t relax until she curls her fingers around his. The pressure of their hands pressed together, the warmth generated between them, comforts him on a level he’s never quite experienced before.

“I missed you,” he says, and he says it awfully quietly for all that they’re alone in the cabin. “Quite a lot, actually.”

Rose replies with a small smile (finally) and a kiss brushed against the corner of his mouth.

(It could almost be a strictly friend-gesture, except for how she lingers and how badly they both blush afterward.)

 

**

 

That night, outside her room, he doesn’t kiss her.

(He certainly thinks about it. Oh, does he think about it. Especially after she’s showered, and she’s standing in the corridor, and despite the strangeness of it all, they’re both clearly stalling before they tuck in for the night.)

There’s an awkward question that neither of them wants to answer, made doubly awkward by the newness of everything, all to do with bedrooms and beds and who and where. They make small talk about anything else instead.

(Her hair is still damp and dripping, droplets slowly sliding down, fattening by millimeters until they’re too heavy to resist the lure of gravity any longer; some of them wet her shirt or fall with a _splat_ to the hardwood floor, while others divert past her collarbone, trickling into the hollow at the top of her breasts and disappearing past her neckline. The Doctor forces himself not to follow their trajectory, ignores the heat rising in his cheeks and his chest.)

They used to do this, before. Lingering outside her bedroom on the TARDIS, both of them loathe to let the day end, talking until Rose was too sleepy to keep her eyes open any longer. But they’re not on the TARDIS anymore, and he’s the one fighting exhaustion now, worn out by a day of too many fights of too many kinds.

(He washed as well, in a decidedly separate bath. Scrubbed off soot and sweat and engine grease and that uncomfortable sticky coating that always seems to accompany all terrestrial long-distance travel. He’s wearing his tee shirt and someone else’s jimjam trousers—Pete’s, probably, how does he always end up wearing things that belong to Jackie’s boyfriends?—and when he raises his arms over his head in a stretching yawn, he catches Rose watching him, her eyes fixed on the jut of his hipbones as they peek out between shirt and trousers.)

He jokes and she smiles again and he is not thinking about pushing her up against the wall and snogging her to within an inch of her life, no sir, he is _not_.

(She visibly swallows and diverts her gaze, and despite the fact that all his crucial bits are covered up, he feels oddly naked, standing with bare arms and feet in front of Rose.)

The conversation tapers off. Rose nervously chews her lower lip. She says something along the lines of _Erm_ or _Well_ or _So_ , looks up at him with an expression he can’t quite read, until suddenly he can.

(He used to notice this look on her before, sometimes, at the end of a night or the middle of an adventure or in the nothing-time of the Vortex, when it was just the two of them bandying about the console; things would get a little too quiet, a little too close, and he’d glance over to find her watching him with questioning eyes, lips parted and chest flushing. That was usually his cue to feel approximately .9 seconds of temptation before instinct kicked in—100% Time Lord, 100% run away, back then. He’d start prattling on about something, bluster and chatter until the moment was well and thoroughly ruined but safe.)

He wishes her good night and disappears into the guest room.

Still a coward, then.

(Donna would smack him if she knew.)

 

**

 

They’re talking about him in Pete’s study the next morning.

“Can’t the debriefing wait until we actually get to work?” he hears Rose ask grumpily, her voice drifting toward him as he pads down the stairs. She’s quiet, but not so quiet that a semi-Time Lord set of ears can’t hear her. “Just a bit knackered, what with all the dimension-jumping and world-saving and all.”

“It’s nothing personal, sweetheart,” a male voice answers, an older voice, and the Doctor almost (only almost) feels a twinge of something like jealousy before he recognizes the voice as Pete’s. He’s quiet too, but it’s different—Rose talks in that odd low half-whisper that people adopt in very late hours, or possibly very early ones, like they’re afraid of waking the house. Pete talks like someone who doesn’t want to get caught.

“But I’ve got a building full of people to report to,” Pete is saying now, “and they’ve a right to some answers. They need to know who he is, or what he is, or preferably both.”

The Doctor freezes just outside the study, his feet just inches away from where the soft yellow light spills out on the corridor floor. Curious, he stays put. He listens.

“Goodness knows nobody asked my opinion, but I don’t really care what he is,” Jackie pipes up. “Looks like the Doctor, thinks and talks like him too. But I won’t hold that against him. He brought back my Rose. Gave her the best of both worlds, if you ask me. That makes him all right in my book.”

The Doctor grins a little at that.

“Can’t you just tell them he’s some bloke that came back with me?” Rose asks.

At that, the Doctor’s grin fades away, leaving a sick feeling behind in its wake. He’s tempted to leave, to turn around and go back up the stairs the way he came, before he hears any more, but he wills himself to stay. He thinks of the things that stupid people do in films—they storm off and miss the rest of the conversation, the bit that redeems the whole thing, and then the plot veers off in an unnecessarily dramatic fashion, all based on one silly misunderstanding.

(But it only took her a day to accept him, before—surely this isn’t all that different?)

“—and how long before someone recognizes him from his last trip here?” Pete says, his words cutting into the Doctor’s thoughts. “The Cybus security footage has been dissected by dozens of analysts, viewed by the entire board. Everyone knows what the Doctor looks like. One of them’s bound to notice him. Even if we keep him away from Torchwood, how long before he gets noticed, all on his own? He’s not just going to sit on his hands here, is he? From what you’ve said, it seems like he draws attention to himself. How long have we got before he’s toppling a corrupt government or communicating with extraterrestrials by microwave or correcting physics professors with maths from the ninety-third century?”

“And how is Torchwood gonna react when they find out he’s part alien?”

The Doctor frowns. He doesn’t like the sound of that. Movies didn’t prepare him for this portion of the conversation.

Sighing in frustration, Pete sets down his coffee mug (at least, that’s what the Doctor assumes, if the hollow clunk of ceramic on wood is anything to go by); he sets it down gently, like he’s afraid he’ll scare Rose off.

“Rose,” he says patiently. “You’ve worked with us long enough to know our policies. We’re not like the other Torchwood. No one’s going to hold him against his will. But we need to be practical about this. At the very least, we should make sure nothing went wrong in the what-did-you-call-it, the metacrisis event—”

“Did you know, I read somewhere that our cells are dying and replacing themselves all the time,” Jackie interrupts, and the Doctor imagines by the thoughtful tone of her voice that she’s inclining her head and staring into the middle distance. “Once a month, you’ve got new skin. Every year, new blood. Every few days, new organs. But you’re still you in the end, right? Don’t really see how this is much different.”

She considers. “A little faster, maybe. A little weirder, too. But then again, he does everything weird.”

“Yes, Jacks, thank you. What I’m saying is, he’s something new, and from the sound of it, he’s something dangerous, too. We need to make sure whatever he does, he’s on our side—no more of this genocidal alien business. We need assurances he won’t turn on us. We’ve got to make sure we can trust him.”

“Of course we can,” Rose says stubbornly. “He’s the Doctor.”

 _He’s the Doctor_.

The conversation continues, but those last few words drown the rest of it out.

Slumping a bit, the Doctor leans against the wall for support. He could write it off as exhaustion and inferior human stamina—he could write it off in constants and variables, actually, devise a formula pinpointing the precise ratio of activity performed to energy spent, figuring exactly how much he should lean on the wall to catch his breath, the angle at which he should perch, the pressure he should apply—but the truth is, he’s just stunned. Thoughts are crashing into each other faster than he cares to process them, hope once again rising to the surface. That clenching feeling in his chest is gone, replaced by a sensation of curious expansion, like his ribs are swelling to accommodate all this emotion, like he’s so light he could drift away. And it’s all certainly a matter of causation, not correlation, in regards to what Rose just said.

_(“Still the Doctor, then?”_

_“No arguments from me!”)_

He can’t believe his faith in her ever faltered.

(Huh. Still rude, too.)

The Doctor pushes away from the wall and his feet cross the threshold of light on the floor, carrying him straight into the study so he can see and be seen.

“Morning,” he says, and they all jump at the sound of his voice, Jackie and Pete turning around to look at him guiltily. He strides right past them and their surprised faces until he reaches Rose, who sits in a leather armchair in the corner with her legs tucked beneath her and a half-full teacup in one hand. The sight of her hits the Doctor with a nearly painful bout of nostalgia; it could almost be another morning on the TARDIS. It’s almost like no time has passed at all.

But it’s the way she smiles when her eyes meet his—a real, proper smile, the kind that lights up a face and a room, the first time he’s seen it since they got back to this godsforsaken universe—that’s what really does him in.

“Jackie, Pete,” the Doctor says, looking at neither of them as he pulls Rose to her feet. “I need a word with Rose. Do you mind?”

“Actually, Doctor—” Pete starts to reply, but the Doctor is already pushing Rose’s teacup into his empty hands and ushering Rose out of the study with a muttered, _Yes, thanks very much!_ thrown over his shoulder.

He pulls Rose down the corridor, past the dining room, past the foyer and out the front door, half-running and reveling in the sound of Rose’s feet pattering two steps for every one of his. Damn, has he missed that sound. The second the heavy wooden door has slammed shut behind them, before she has a chance to ask or say anything, he pushes her up against the wall.

Hands framing her face, he presses his lips to hers in a kiss.

(It’s a little difficult to keep track of all of his 1,000 thoughts after that.)

She stiffens at first, mouth parting in shock—oh, he really wants to take advantage of that opening, that sounds lovely doesn’t it, his tongue sliding over that plump lower lip, teasing her until she whimpers—but she warms up to the idea quickly enough. Her eyes shutter closed and her fingers fist in the front of his shirt, pulling him closer until both of their hearts are beating against each other in staccatoed symmetry. Her lips are soft and pliant as they move against his, tasting of tea and sugar and just the tiniest hint of sex. It’s more than enough to send hormones flooding through the Doctor’s brain, leaving him lightheaded and giddy.

Blimey, if this is how kissing feels for humans, no wonder they’re so keen to do it so often.

He has to break for air before she does (still adjusting to this new body and its funny little respiratory quirks), but pulling back, he’s pleased to note that Rose looks every bit as dazed and flustered as he feels.

“Erm,” she laughs, a shaky breath leaving her kissed-pink lips. “A word?”

His brow furrows in confusion. “What?” he says breathlessly.

Rose laughs again, a bright and bubbly sound, trapping her tongue between her teeth. It’s really not fair, how distracting that is. “You said you wanted a word.”

“Right,” he says. His brain is impossibly fuzzy. “I think it might have been ‘Thank you’?”

“That’s two words.”

A grin spreads over his face. “‘Thanks,’ then.”

She pulls him down for another kiss, her mouth warm and open under his, and he knows it means _You’re welcome_.

 

***

 

(Explaining things to Tony is a little easier.

“He’s like a starfish,” Rose tells him.

Tony shrugs. “Cool.”)


End file.
